Pogrom
A pogrom is a violent riot aimed at the massacre or expulsion of an ethnic or religious group, particularly one aimed at Jews. The Slavic-languages term originally entered the English language in order to describe 19th- and 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire. Similar attacks against Jews at other times and places also became retrospectively known as pogroms. The word is now also sometimes used to describe publicly sanctioned purgative attacks against non-Jewish ethnic or religious groups. The characteristics of a pogrom vary widely, depending on the specific incidents, at times leading to, or culminating in, massacres.
Significant pogroms in the Russian Empire included the Odessa pogroms, Warsaw pogrom, Kishinev pogrom, Kiev Pogrom, and Białystok pogrom. After the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, several pogroms took place amid the power struggles in Eastern Europe, including the Lwów pogrom and Kiev Pogroms.
The most significant pogrom in Nazi Germany was the Kristallnacht of 1938 in which at least 91 Jews were killed, a further thirty thousand arrested and subsequently incarcerated in concentration camps, a thousand synagogues burned, and over seven thousand Jewish businesses destroyed or damaged. Notorious pogroms of World War II included the 1941 Farhud in Iraq, the July 1941 Iaşi pogrom in Romania – in which over 13,200 Jews were killed – as well as the Jedwabne pogrom in German-occupied Poland. Post-World War II pogroms included the 1945 Tripoli pogrom, the 1946 Kielce pogrom and the 1947 Aleppo pogrom.
Etymology
First recorded in 1882, the Russian word pogrom is derived from the common prefix po- and the verb gromit' meaning "to destroy, to wreak havoc, to demolish violently". The noun pogrom, which has a relatively short history, is used in English and many other languages as a loanword, possibly borrowed from Yiddish. Its widespread circulation in today's world began with the antisemitic violence in the Russian Empire in 1881–1883.in Frankfurt, 1819. On the left, two peasant women are assaulting a Jewish man with pitchfork and broom. On the right, a man wearing spectacles, tails and a six-button waistcoat, "perhaps a pharmacist or a schoolteacher," holds a Jewish man by the throat and is about to club him with a truncheon. The houses are being looted. A contemporary engraving by Johann Michael Voltz.
Historical background
The first recorded anti-Jewish riots took place in Alexandria in the year 38 CE, followed by the more known riot of 66 CE. Other notable events took place in Europe during the Middle Ages. Jewish communities were targeted in the Black Death Jewish persecutions of 1348–1350, in Toulon in 1348, the Massacre of 1391 in Barcelona as well as in other Catalan cities, during the Erfurt massacre, the Basel massacre, massacres in Aragon and in Flanders, as well as the "Valentine's Day" Strasbourg pogrom of 1349. Some 510 Jewish communities were destroyed during this period, extending further to the Brussels massacre of 1370. On Holy Saturday of 1389, a pogrom began in Prague that led to the burning of the Jewish quarter, the killing of many Jews, and the suicide of many Jews trapped in the main synagogue; the number of dead was estimated at 400–500 men, women and children.The brutal murders of Jews and Poles occurred during the Khmelnytsky Uprising of 1648–1657 in present-day Ukraine. Modern historians give estimates of the scale of the murders by Khmelnytsky's Cossacks ranging between 40,000 and 100,000 men, women and children, or perhaps many more.
The outbreak of violence against Jews occurred at the beginning of the 19th century as a reaction to Jewish emancipation in the German Confederation.
Russian Empire
The Russian Empire, which previously had very few Jews, acquired territories in the Russian Partition that contained a large Jewish populations, during the military partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793 and 1795. In conquered territories, a new political entity called the Pale of Settlement was formed in 1791 by Catherine the Great. Most Jews from the former Commonwealth were allowed to reside only within the Pale, including families expelled by royal decree from St. Petersburg, Moscow and other large Russian cities. The 1821 Odessa pogroms marked the beginning of the 19th century pogroms in Tsarist Russia; there were four more such pogroms in Odessa before the end of the century. Following the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 by Narodnaya Volya – blamed on the Jews by the Russian government, anti-Jewish events turned into a wave of over 200 pogroms by their modern definition, which lasted for several years. Jewish self-governing :wikt:Kehillah|Kehillah were abolished by Tsar Nicholas I in 1844.The first in 20th-century Russia was the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 in which 49 Jews were killed, hundreds wounded, 700 homes destroyed and 600 businesses pillaged. In the same year, pogroms took place in Gomel, Smela, Feodosiya and Melitopol. Extreme savagery was typified by mutilations of the wounded. They were followed by the Zhitomir pogrom, and the Kiev pogrom of October 1905 resulting in a massacre of approximately 100 Jews. In three years between 1903 and 1906, about 660 pogroms were recorded in Ukraine and Bessarabia; half a dozen more in Belorussia, carried out with the Russian government's complicity, but no anti-Jewish pogroms were recorded in Poland. At about that time, the Jewish Labor Bund began organizing armed self-defense units ready to shoot back, and the pogroms subsided for a number of years. According to professor Colin Tatz, between 1881 and 1920 there were 1,326 pogroms in Ukraine which took the lives of 70,000 to 250,000 civilian Jews, leaving half a million homeless.
Eastern Europe after World War I
Large-scale pogroms, which began in the Russian Empire several decades earlier, intensified during the period of the Russian Civil War in the aftermath of World War I. Professor Zvi Gitelman estimated that only in 1918–1919 over 1,200 pogroms took place in Ukraine, thus amounting to the greatest slaughter of Jews in Eastern Europe since 1648.Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his book Two Hundred Years Together provided additional statistics from research conducted by Nahum Gergel. Gergel counted 1,236 incidents of anti-Jewish violence and estimated that 887 mass pogroms occurred, the remainder being classified as "excesses" not assuming mass proportions. The Kiev pogroms of 1919, according to Gitelman, were the first of a subsequent wave of pogroms in which between 30,000 and 70,000 Jews were massacred across Ukraine. Of all the pogroms accounted for in Gergel's research:
- About 40 percent were perpetrated by the Ukrainian People's Republic forces led by Symon Petliura,
- *The Republic issued orders condemning pogroms, but lacked authority to intervene. After May 1919 the Directory lost its role as a credible governing body; almost 75 percent of pogroms occurred between May and September of that year. Thousands of Jews were killed only for being Jewish, without any political affiliations.
- 25 percent by the Ukrainian Green Army and various Ukrainian nationalist gangs,
- 17 percent by the White Army, especially the forces of Anton Denikin,
- 8.5 percent of Gergel's total was attributed to pogroms carried out by men of the Red Army.
- *These pogroms were not, however, sanctioned by the Bolshevik leadership; the high command "vigorously condemned these pogroms and disarmed the guilty regiments", and the pogroms would soon be condemned by Mikhail Kalinin in a speech made at a military parade in the Ukraine.
On 8 August 1919, during the Polish–Soviet War, Polish troops took over Minsk in Operation Minsk. They killed 31 Jews merely suspected of supporting the Bolshevist movement, beat and attacked many more, looted 377 Jewish-owned shops and ransacked many private homes. The "Morgenthau's report of October 1919 stated that there is no question that some of the Jewish leaders exaggerated these evils." According to Elissa Bemporad, the "violence endured by the Jewish population under the Poles encouraged popular support for the Red Army, as Jewish public opinion welcomed the establishment of the Belorussian SSR."
After the First World War, during the localized armed conflicts of independence, 72 Jews were killed and 443 injured in the 1918 Lwów pogrom. The following year, pogroms were reported by the New York Tribune in several cities in the newly established Second Polish Republic.
Rest of the world
In the early 20th century, pogroms broke out elsewhere in the world as well. In 1904 in Ireland, the Limerick boycott caused several Jewish families to leave the town. During the 1911 Tredegar riot in Wales, Jewish homes and businesses were looted and burned over the period of a week, before the British Army was called in by then-Home Secretary Winston Churchill, who described the riot as a "pogrom". In 1919 there was a pogrom in Argentina, during the Tragic Week.In the Mandatory Palestine under British administration, the Jews were targeted in the 1929 Hebron massacre and the 1929 Safed pogrom. In 1934 there were pogroms against Jews in Turkey and Algeria.
Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe
The first pogrom in Nazi Germany was the Kristallnacht, often called Pogromnacht, in which at least 91 Jews were killed, a further 30,000 arrested and incarcerated in Nazi concentration camps, over 1,000 synagogues burned, and over 7,000 Jewish businesses destroyed or damaged.During World War II, Nazi German death squads encouraged local populations in German-occupied Europe to commit pogroms against Jews. Brand new battalions of Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz were mobilized from among the German minorities.
A large number of pogroms occurred during the Holocaust at the hands of non-Germans. Perhaps the deadliest of these Holocaust-era pogroms was the Iași pogrom in Romania, perpetrated by Ion Antonescu, in which as many as 13,266 Jews were killed by Romanian citizens, police and military officials.
On 1–2 June 1941, in the two-day Farhud pogrom in Iraq, perpetrated by Rashid Ali, Yunis al-Sabawi, and the al-Futuwa youth, "rioters murdered between 150 and 180 Jews, injured 600 others, and raped an undetermined number of women. They also looted some 1,500 stores and homes". Also 300-400 non-Jewish rioters were killed in the attempt to quell the violence.
, July 1941
In June–July 1941, encouraged by the Einsatzgruppen in the city of Lviv the Ukrainian People's Militia perpetrated two citywide pogroms in which around 6,000 Polish Jews were murdered, in retribution for alleged collaboration with the Soviet NKVD. In Lithuania, some local police led by Algirdas Klimaitis and Lithuanian partisans – consisting of LAF units reinforced by 3,600 deserters from the 29th Lithuanian Territorial Corps of the Red Army promulgated anti-Jewish pogroms in Kaunas along with occupying Nazis. On 25–26 June 1941, about 3,800 Jews were killed and synagogues and Jewish settlements burned.
During the Jedwabne pogrom of July 1941, ethnic Poles burned at least 340 Jews in a barn in the presence of Nazi German Ordnungspolizei. The role of the German Einsatzgruppe B remains the subject of debate.
After World War II
After the end of World War II, a series of violent antisemitic incidents occurred against returning Jews throughout Europe, particularly in the Soviet-occupied East where Nazi propagandists had extensively promoted the notion of a Jewish-Communist conspiracy. Anti-Jewish riots also took place in Britain in 1947.In the Arab world, anti-Jewish rioters killed over 140 Jews in the 1945 Anti-Jewish Riots in Tripolitania. Following the start of the 1947–48 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine, a number of anti-Jewish events occurred throughout the Arab world, some of which have been described as pogroms. In 1947, half of Aleppo's 10,000 Jews left the city in the wake of the Aleppo riots, while other anti-Jewish riots took place in British Aden and the French Moroccan cities of Oujda and Jerada.
In 2020, a series of riots in North East Delhi in which Hindu nationalist mobs attacked Muslims and vandalized Muslim properties and mosques was widely described as a pogrom. During the riots, 53 people were killed and more than 350 were injured.
Usage
According to Encyclopædia Britannica, "the term is usually applied to attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the first extensive pogroms followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881", and the Wiley-Blackwell Dictionary of Modern European History Since 1789 states that pogroms "were antisemitic disturbances that periodically occurred within the tsarist empire." However, the term is widely used to refer to many events which occurred prior to the Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire. Historian of Russian Jewry John Klier writes in Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882 that "By the twentieth century, the word 'pogrom' had become a generic term in English for all forms of collective violence directed against Jews." Abramson wrote that "in mainstream usage the word has come to imply an act of antisemitism", since while "Jews have not been the only group to suffer under this phenomenon ... historically Jews have been frequent victims of such violence"., which destroyed the wealthiest black community in the United States, has been described as a pogrom.
The term is also used in reference to attacks on non-Jewish ethnic minorities, and accordingly some scholars do not include antisemitism as the defining characteristic of pogroms. Reviewing its uses in scholarly literature, historian Werner Bergmann proposes that pogroms should be "defined as a unilateral, nongovernmental form of collective violence that is initiated by the majority population against a largely defenseless ethnic group, and he also states that pogroms occur when the majority expects the state to provide it with no assistance in overcoming a threat from the minority," but he adds that in Western usage, the word's "anti-Semitic overtones" have been retained. Historian David Engel supports this, writing that "there can be no logically or empirically compelling grounds for declaring that some particular episode does or does not merit the label ," but states that the majority of the incidents "habitually" described as pogroms took place in societies that were significantly divided by ethnicity and/or religion where the violence was committed by members of the higher-ranking group against members of a stereotyped lower-ranking group with which they expressed some complaint, and the members of the higher-ranking group justified their acts of violence by claiming that the law of the land would not be used to stop them.
There is no universally accepted set of characteristics which define the term pogrom. Klier writes that "when applied indiscriminately to events in Eastern Europe, the term can be misleading, the more so when it implies that 'pogroms' were regular events in the region and that they always shared common features." Use of the term pogrom to refer to events in 1918–19 in Polish cities including Kielce pogrom, Pinsk massacre and Lwów pogrom, was specifically avoided in the 1919 Morgenthau Report and the word "excesses" was used instead because the authors argued that the use of the term "pogrom" required a situation to be antisemitic rather than political in nature, which meant that it was inapplicable to the conditions existing in a war zone, and media use of the term pogrom to refer to the 1991 Crown Heights riot caused public controversy. In 2008, two separate attacks in the West Bank by Israeli Jewish settlers on Palestinian Arabs were characterized as pogroms by then Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Olmert.
Werner Bergmann suggests that all such incidents have a particularly unifying characteristic: "y the collective attribution of a threat, the pogrom differs from other forms of violence, such as lynchings, which are directed at individual members of a minority group, while the imbalance of power in favor of the rioters distinguishes pogroms from other forms of riots ; and again, the low level of organization separates them from vigilantism, terrorism, massacre and genocide".
Selected list of events named pogroms
This is a partial list of events for which one of the commonly accepted names includes the word "pogrom".| Date | Pogrom name | Alternative name | Deaths | Description |
| 38 | Alexandrian pogrom | Alexandrian riots | Aulus Avilius Flaccus, the Egyptian prefect of Alexandria appointed by Tiberius in 32 CE, may have encouraged the outbreak of violence; Philo wrote that Flaccus was later arrested and eventually executed for his part in this event. Scholarly research around the subject has been divided on certain points, including whether the Alexandrian Jews fought to keep their citizenship or to acquire it, whether they evaded the payment of the poll-tax or prevented any attempts to impose it on them, and whether they were safeguarding their identity against the Greeks or against the Egyptians. | |
| 1066 | Granada pogrom | 1066 Granada massacre | 4,000 Jews | A mob stormed the royal palace in Granada, which was at that time in Muslim-ruled al-Andalus, assassinated the Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela and massacred much of the Jewish population of the city. |
| 1096 | 1096 pogroms | Rhineland massacres | 2,000 Jews | Peasant crusaders from France and Germany during the People's Crusade, led by Peter the Hermit, attacked Jewish communities in the three towns of Speyer, Worms and Mainz. They were the first Christian pogroms to be officially recorded. |
| 1113 | Kiev pogrom | Kiev revolt | Rebellion sparked by the death of the Grand Prince of Kiev, in which Jews connected to the prince's economic affairs were among the victims | |
| 1349 | Strasbourg pogrom | Strasbourg massacre | ||
| 1391 | 1391 pogroms | The Massacre of 1391 | Series of massacres and forced conversions beginning June 4, 1391 in the city of Seville before extending to the rest of Castile and the Crown of Aragon. It is considered one of the Middle Ages' largest attacks on the Jews, and were ultimately expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492. | |
| 1506 | Lisbon pogrom | Lisbon massacre | 1,000+ New Christians | After an episode of famine and bad harvests, a pogrom happened in Lisbon, Portugal, in which more than 1,000 "New Christian" people were slaughtered and/or burnt by an angry Christian mob, in the first night of what became known as the "Lisbon Massacre". The killing occurred from 19 to 21 April, almost eliminating the entire Jewish or Jewish-descended community in that city. Even the Portuguese military and the king himself had difficulty stopping it. Today the event is remembered with a monument in S. Domingos' church. |
| 1563 | Polotsk pogrom | Polotsk drownings | Following the fall of Polotsk to the army of Ivan IV, all those who refused to convert to Orthodox Christianity were ordered drowned in the Western Dvina river. | |
| 1821–1871 | First Odessa pogroms | The Greeks of Odessa attacked the local Jewish community, in what began as economic disputes | ||
| 1881–1884 | First Russian Tsarist pogroms | A large-scale wave of anti-Jewish riots swept through south-western Imperial Russia from 1881 to 1884 | ||
| 1881 | Warsaw pogrom | 2 Jews killed, 24 injured | Three days of rioting against Jews, Jewish stores, businesses, and residences in the streets adjoining the Holy Cross Church. | |
| 1885 | Rock Springs Massacre | Anti-Chinese Pogrom | At least 28 immigrant Chinese miners | The riot, and resulting massacre of immigrant Chinese miners by white immigrant miners, was the result of racial prejudice toward the Chinese miners, who were perceived to be taking jobs from the white miners. This occurred on September 2, 1885, in the present-day United States city of Rock Springs in Sweetwater County, Wyoming. Rioters burned 78 Chinese homes, resulting in approximately US$150,000 in property damage. |
| 1902 | Częstochowa pogrom | 14 Jews | A mob attacked the Jewish shops, killing fourteen Jews and one gendarme. The Russian military brought to restore order were stoned by mob. | |
| 1903–1906 | Second Russian Tsarist pogroms | 2,000+ Jews | A much bloodier wave of pogroms broke out from 1903 to 1906, leaving an estimated 2,000 Jews dead and many more wounded, as many Jewish residents took arms to defend their families and property from the attackers. The 1905 pogrom against the Jewish population in Odessa was the most serious pogrom of the period, with reports of up to 2,500 Jews killed. | |
| 1903 | First Kishinev pogrom | 47 Jews | Three days of anti-Jewish rioting sparked by anti-semitic articles in local newspapers | |
| 1904 | Limerick pogrom | Limerick boycott | - | An economic boycott waged against the small Jewish community in Limerick, Ireland, for over two years |
| 1905 | Second Kishinev pogrom | 19 Jews | Two days of anti-Jewish rioting beginning as political protests against the Tsar | |
| 1905 | Kiev Pogrom | 100 Jews | Following a city hall meeting, a mob was drawn into the streets, proclaiming that "all Russia's troubles stemmed from the machinations of the Jews and socialists." | |
| 1906 | Siedlce pogrom | 26 Jews | An attack organized by the Russian secret police. Anti-semitic pamphlets had been distributed for over a week and before any unrest begun, a curfew was declared. | |
| 1909 | Adana pogrom | Adana massacre | 30,000 Armenians | A massacre of Armenians in the city of Adana amidst the Countercoup resulted in a series of anti-Armenian pogroms throughout the district. |
| 1911 | Tredegar pogrom South Wales | Tredegar riots | - | Jewish shops were ransacked and the army had to be brought in |
| 1914 | Anti-Serb pogrom in Sarajevo | Sarajevo frenzy of hate | 2 Serbs | Occurred shortly after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. |
| 1918 | Lwów pogrom | Lemberg massacre | 52–150 Jews, 270 Ukrainians | During the Polish-Ukrainian War over three days of unrest in the city, an estimated 52–150 Jewish residents were killed and hundreds more were injured by Polish soldiers and civilians. Two hundred and seventy Ukrainians were also killed during this incident. The Poles did not stop the pogrom until two days after it began. |
| 1918 | Porvenir Massacre | Anti-Mexican Pogrom | 15 | The Porvenir massacre was an incident on January 28, 1918 outside the village of Porvenir in Presidio County, Texas, in which Texas Rangers, U.S. Cavalry soldiers, and local ranchers killed 15 unarmed Mexican villagers, both men and boys. |
| 1919 | Proskurov pogrom | 1500-1700 Jews | The pogrom was initiated by Ivan Samosenko following a failed Bolshevik uprising against the Ukrainian People's Republic in the city. The massacre was carried out by Ukrainian People's Republic soldiers of Samosenko. According to historians Yonah Alexander and Kenneth Myers the soldiers marched into the centre of town accompanied by a military band and engaged in atrocities under the slogan: "Kill the Jews, and save the Ukraine." They were ordered to save the ammunition in the process and use only lances and bayonets. | |
| 1919 | Elaine Pogrom | Elaine Massacre | 250 African Americans | A massive African American pogrom in Elaine, Arkansas USA carried out by local White Americans, local police and Federal troops. Considered one of the largest, if not the largest Pogrom carried out in the United States |
| 1919 | Kiev Pogroms | 60+ | A series of Jewish pogroms in various places around Kiev carried out by White Volunteer Army troops | |
| 1919 | Pinsk pogrom | Pinsk massacre | 36 Jews | Mass execution of thirty-five Jewish residents of Pinsk in April 1919 by the Polish Army, during the opening stages of the Polish–Soviet War |
| 1919–20 | Vilna pogrom | Vilna offensive | 65+ Jews and non-Jews | As Polish troops entered the city, dozens of people connected with the Lit-Bel were arrested, and some were executed |
| 1921 | Tulsa Massacre | Tulsa massacre | 26 whites and 39 blacks confirmed; 100-300 blacks estimate | Economic and social tension against black community in Greenwood |
| 1929 | Hebron pogrom | Hebron massacre | 67 Jews | During the 1929 Palestine riots, sixty-seven Jews were killed as the violence spread to Hebron, then part of Mandatory Palestine, by Arabs incited to violence by rumors that Jews were massacring Arabs in Jerusalem and seizing control of Muslim holy places. |
| 1934 | 1934 Thrace pogroms | 1 Jew | It was followed by vandalizing of Jewish houses and shops. The tensions started in June 1934 and spread to a few other villages in Eastern Thrace region and to some small cities in Western Aegean region. At the height of violent events, it was rumoured that a rabbi was stripped naked and was dragged through the streets shamefully while his daughter was raped. Over 15,000 Jews had to flee from the region. | |
| 1936 | Przytyk pogrom | Przytyk riot | 2 Jews and 1 Polish | Some of the Jewish residents gathered in the town square in anticipation of the attack by the peasants, but nothing happened on that day. Two days later, however, on a market day, as historians Martin Gilbert and David Vital state, peasants attacked their Jewish neighbors. |
| 1938 | November pogrom | Kristallnacht | 91 Jews | Coordinated attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria, carried out by SA paramilitary forces and non-Jewish civilians. Accounts from the foreign journalists working in Germany sent shock waves around the world. |
| 1940 | Dorohoi pogrom | 53 Jews | Romanian military units carried out a pogrom against the local Jews, during which, according to an official Romanian report, 53 Jews were murdered, and dozens injured | |
| 1941 | Iași pogrom | 13,266 Jews | One of the most violent pogroms in Jewish history, launched by governmental forces in the Romanian city of Iaşi against its Jewish population. | |
| 1941 | Antwerp Pogrom | 0 | One of the few pogroms of Belgian history. Flemish collaborators attacked and burned synagogues and attacked a rabbi in the city of Antwerp | |
| 1941 | Bucharest pogrom | Legionnaires' rebellion | 125 Jews and 30 soldiers | As the privileges of the paramilitary organisation Iron Guard were being cut off by Conducător Ion Antonescu, members of the Iron Guard, also known as the Legionnaires, revolted. During the rebellion and pogrom, the Iron Guard killed 125 Jews and 30 soldiers died in the confrontation with the rebels. |
| 1941 | Tykocin pogrom | 1,400–1,700 Jews | Mass murder of Jewish residents of Tykocin in occupied Poland during World War II, soon after Nazi German attack on the Soviet Union. | |
| 1941 | Jedwabne pogrom | 340 Jews | The local rabbi was forced to lead a procession of about 40 people to a pre-emptied barn, killed and buried along with fragments of a destroyed monument of Lenin. A further 250-300 Jews were led to the same barn later that day, locked inside and burned alive using kerosene | |
| 1941 | Pogrom in Krnjeuša | 240 Croats | An organized attack in the territory of the Catholic parish of Krnjeuša in northwestern Bosnia and Herzegovina, carried out by Serb Chetniks against the local Catholic Croat population | |
| 1941 | Farhud | 180 Jewish Iraqis | ||
| 1941 | Lviv pogroms | Thousands of Jews | Massacres of Jews by the German and by the Ukrainian People's Militia. | |
| 1946 | Kunmadaras pogrom | 4 Jews | A frenzy instigated by the crowd's libelous belief that some Jews had made sausage out of Christian children | |
| 1946 | Miskolc pogrom | 2 Jews | Riots started as demonstrations against economic hardships and later became anti-Semitic | |
| 1946 | Kielce pogrom | 38–42 Jews | Violence against the Jewish community centre, initiated by Polish Communist armed forces and continued by a mob of local townsfolk. | |
| 1955 | Istanbul pogrom | Istanbul riots | 13–30 Greeks | Organized mob attacks directed primarily at Istanbul's Greek minority. Accelerated the emigration of ethnic Greeks from Turkey. |
| 1956 | 1956 Ceylonese riots | 1956 anti-Tamil pogrom | 150 Primarily Tamils | 1956 anti-Tamil pogrom or Gal Oya massacre/riots were the first ethnic riots that targeted the minority Tamils in independent Sri Lanka. |
| 1958 | 1958 anti-Tamil pogrom | 1958 anti-Tamil pogrom | 300 Primarily Tamils | 1958 anti-Tamil pogrom also known as 58 riots, refer to the first island wide ethnic riots and pogrom in Sri Lanka. |
| 1964 | Anti-Arab Pogrom | Zanzibar Revolution | At least 80 people were killed and 200 more people were injured during the revolution | The revolution ended 200 years of Arab dominance in Zanzibar, and each year it is commemorated on the island with anniversary celebrations and a public holiday. 2,000–4,000 civilians were killed in the revolution's aftermath. |
| 1966 | 1966 anti-Igbo pogrom | A series of massacres directed at Igbo and other southern Nigerian residents throughout Nigeria before and after the overthrow of the Aguiyi-Ironsi junta by Murtala Mohammed. | ||
| 1977 | 1977 anti-Tamil pogrom | 300-1500 Primarily Tamils | The 1977 anti-Tamil pogrom followed the 1977 general elections in Sri Lanka where the Sri Lankan Tamil nationalistic Tamil United Liberation Front won a plurality of minority Sri Lankan Tamil votes in which it stood for secession. | |
| 1983 | Black July | 1983 anti-Tamil pogrom | 400–3,000 Tamils | Over seven days mobs of mainly Sinhalese attacked Tamil targets, burning, looting and killing |
| 1984 | 1984 anti-Sikh riots | 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom | 8,000 Sikhs | In October 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom in Delhi, and other parts of India, Sikhs in India were targeted |
| 1988 | Sumgait pogrom | 26+ Armenians and 6+ Azeris | Mobs made up largely of ethnic Azeris formed into groups that went on to attack and kill Armenians both on the streets and in their apartments; widespread looting and a general lack of concern from police officers allowed the situation to worsen | |
| 1988 | Kirovabad pogrom | 3+ Soviet soldiers, 3+ Azeris and 1+ Armenian | Ethnic Azeris attacked Armenians throughout the city | |
| 1990 | Baku pogrom | 90 Armenians, 20 Russian soldiers | Seven-day attack during which Armenians were beaten, tortured, murdered and expelled from the city. There were also many raids on apartments, robberies and arsons | |
| 1991 | Crown Heights pogrom | Crown Heights riot | 1 Jew and 1 non-Jew | A three-day riot that occurred in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York. The riots incited by the death of the seven-year-old Gavin Cato, unleashed simmering tensions within Crown Heights' black community against the Orthodox Jewish community. In its wake, several Jews were seriously injured; one Orthodox Jewish man, Yankel Rosenbaum, was killed; and a non-Jewish man, allegedly mistaken by rioters for a Jew, was killed by a group of African-American men. |
| 2004 | March pogrom | 2004 unrest in Kosovo | 16 ethnic Serbs | Over 4,000 Serbs were forced to leave their homes, 935 Serb houses, 10 public facilities and 35 Serbian Orthodox church-buildings were desecrated, damaged or destroyed, and six towns and nine villages were ethnically cleansed according to Serbian media |
| 2010 | Lahore pogrom | 2010 Ahmadiyya mosques massacre | 94 Ahmadiyya Muslims | Systemic violence was perpetrated against a minority Muslim community in the Pakistani city of Lahore. Responsibility of attacks was claimed by Tehrik-i-Taliban. Human Rights groups in Pakistan alleged that government took inadequate steps to provide security despite repeated warnings. |